Friday, March 14, 2014

THE SWEATY PROPOSAL

I go to yoga most every day which means I get to practice twice as much as my boyfriend. Since Jim has his kidlings every other week, his practice is limited to a week-on-week-off situation. When he does get to practice we try to work our schedules so that we can get our sweat on together.

The kids were with Frick and Frack this week, but according to the marital separation agreement, Jim gets a few bonus hours with Benjamin every Wednesday that he’s in his mom’s custody. So Jim picks Ben up on Wednesday afternoons and they go eat or drive go-karts or ride bikes and then Jim drops his son back off at his mom’s house where neither the little boy nor his older sister has a key or a code to get into the house, so, like usual, Benjamin had to ring the doorbell and wait to be let into the home he lives in 50% of the time.

After that, Jim and I headed for the studio so that we could go take the last yoga class of the night, the 8:30PM. 8:30s are out of our norm. 6:30PM is when we usually practice together. But Jim wanted to get in some yoga even though he’d been with Benjamin during his usual 6:30 class. So we decided to tough out the late one.

When we got the studio Jim took our mats in to the yoga room to set up. That’s our routine. One of us takes both mats and goes in to lay them down. When he and our teacher, Stefan, came out of the hot room Stefan told me that he had to move us to the front row; it was looking to be a big class, and he needed space in the middle for newcomers. Cool. No problem. Not the first time that’s happened. I tend to gravitate toward the middle, but I like the front row just fine.

While we were jawing in the lobby before class Tanya and Cam showed up. And Cameron and Jonathan. And Barry was there and Keira too. It was shaping up to be an unusually great 8:30 class. All those people, students and teachers, have great discipline and it rubs off. But in this class they were a bunch of gigglers. Tanya couldn't stop smiling. And nobody had discipline. Jim whispered sweet nothings at me between poses. When Stefan helped him with his grip in Rabbit Jim told him that he wasn’t actually trying, and Stefan just laughed. “You’re not supposed to tell them that stuff,” I whispered at Jim. Stefan heard me. He let it go.

While we were laying in savasana just before final breathing, a piece of the ceiling tile above me broke away, and before I knew what was happening, that piece of the ceiling had slowly descended to rest on my abdomen. By way of Jim’s carefully constructed apparatus, Stefan had used a thin wire to lower a little wood structure housing a small jewelry box in that telltale robin’s egg blue color.

The oh-my-goshes started there and didn’t let up for the next ten minutes. My only pause was when Jim leaned toward me and asked if I would marry him. I said YES! and went back to oh-my-goshing. While the class did the final breathing exercise, I sat cross-legged on my mat stunned, very sweaty, and staring down at the tiny Tiffany box. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.

“Open it,” Jim said.

Oh yeah. I removed the white satin ribbon and the blue lid and dumped out a black ring box. In the box was the ring for me. It’s simple. It’s dainty. It’s perfect. He’s perfect. I’m pretty deep in this love thing, and I am so excited to be that man’s wife. There just isn’t anyone better. I won the dude lottery with this one, and I get to keep him.

My boyfriend proposed to me at our yoga studio, my favorite place in town. He made sure to do it on a day that my friend Cameron would be in town so that he could be in class too. He got help in putting up the special ceiling tile. He had our teacher be the one to lower the apparatus. He employed my team—my yoga family—to create a story to go with the proposal. The concept was made for especially for me, and it was flawless, right down to that famous blue box. My Jim done good. When he asked, there was simply no other answer than, “Of course.”